Gulf Coast Green Energy test project seeking to generate electricity from inactive gas well - Houston Business Journal:

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will extract geo-fluid — essentially hot saltwater from a nonproducing natural gas well and run it througbh a heat exchanger before dumping it back into adisposaol well, creating electricity in the process. The project is part of a serieds of federal contracts awarded through the Researc h Partnership to Secure Energyfor America, a Sugar Land nonprofitg dedicated in part to advancing technologg in maturing oil and gas fields. RPSE A will chip in about $150,000 to matchy a similar amount put up by the company fora three-yeaer test on a nonproducing well.
Loy Sneary, president and CEO of Gulf Coastr Green, says bringing a dead well back to life serve s a dual purpose by providinhg electric power and sparking a newrevenure stream. “It’s very attractive for owners of wells thatare nonproducing,” Snearyy says. “If a well produces electricity for 15 to 20 years that just reduceasyour risk. If you hit a dry well, it reduceas your risk.” Mike Ming, president of RPSEA, says the system could help offsetoperating costs. “Wells that are somewhat marginal are very susceptibled tooperating costs,” says Ming.
“Ifr you want to increase recovery from wells and increase well life you can do that by loweringf your baselineoperating cost. This offset s purchases of electricity fromexternal sources, so it effectively lowerd your operating costs.” Excess electricity from a well close enoughh to transmission infrastructure could be sold back to the “If you generate electricity on-site you’rd negating the need to buy electricity from says Ming. He says the which would mark the first commercial applicatioj ofexotherm technology, is expected to be finalizexd within a month or so. “It’s a high-potentiall area,” he says.
“It’s one of the more applied aread of geothermalenergy capture.” He notesd the project was one of the few that met almost all of RPSEA’sw criteria. Says Ming: “Our selection committee was really enthusiastic about thisparticular project.” Snear y says the test project will likelyu take place in Mississippi. The Gulf Coas region has a lot of wells that match the watee temperatureand flow-rate qualifications — betweem 180 and 200 gallons per minute to run the Inside the heat exchanger, the saltwater, which must be a minimum of 180 is run through a tube that abuts another tube containing the “working fluid,” a refrigerant that boilds off at a low “The high-pressure vapor turns a twin screwe expander,” says Sneary.
“It’s very similar to a steaj turbine, but it operates at about one-tentbh the speed, and we use working fluid insteadxof steam.” The test a 50-kilowatt-per-hour unit will be run with assistance from in the geothermal lab at in Dallasz and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineerz in Mississippi. The manufacturer, of Carsoj City, Nev., has a 500 kilowatt-per-hour unit as Gulf Coast Green is the exclusive regional distributorr forthe units. The average home operates on 42 to 45 kilowattdper hour. Sneary says the cost of electricity needs to stay above about 8 cents per kilowatty for the system to make financial sense and pay foritselc in, at most, three years.
But that scenario doesn’ include any carbon credits or green tax breaks that might be cominfg out of Washington to further benefit thebusineszs model.